Tag Archive for review

Before we begin, this is completely unrelated to the Xbox 360 Earth Defense Force games.

Aliens are attacking Earth, and you have to fight them off. Story generally is not a strong point of shoot-em-ups, especially in the days of the SNES, and there is in fact absolutely no mention of the story in-game. This is how it should be. No, what the game does mention is weapons, and this is where it stood out compared to some of its competition.

Remember DOOM? Of course you do. DOOM is one of the granddaddies of first-person shooters. You are a lone survivor, a marine trapped in the Union Aerospace Corporation’s base on Phobos during an invasion from Hell. You must blast, saw, and RIP AND TEAR your way through hordes of zombies and various demons… for some reason that’s unstated, but probably because “eh, it’s better than dying.”

DOOM was released in 1993 and was a revolutionary game. It was followed up the next year by DOOM II: Hell On Earth, and later Final DOOM, a compilation of DOOM, DOOM II, and two feature length — and quite difficult — map packs built around the DOOM mythos and engine (TNT Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment). DOOM modding has flourished since the WAD format was originally reverse engineered not long after the game’s release. Even today, 22 years since the game’s release, new DOOM levels and mods are being constructed, released, and enjoyed by many. And with a new DOOM on the horizon, we thought it would be prudent to talk about our favourite DOOM mod.

Long ago in the early days of Cordilon Gaming, we wrote about DOOM: The Roguelike, which is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a roguelike game in the traditional sense of the term — designed to be played with a keyboard and terminal, with ASCII representations of the map and descending levels into the dungeon (though a tile mode is available) — built around DOOM, but with added mechanics such as weapon crafting and customization, classes, feats, and items and monsters galore. If you like roguelikes, you should give this one a try. It’s a blast. Literally, because it’s DOOM, and what kind of DOOM wouldn’t involve blowing shit up?

In 2013, some clever folks on the ZDoom forums led by lead developer and programmer Yholl released an early version of a mod for ZDoom called DoomRL Arsenal, with the goal of adding in the classes, monsters, and weapon crafting/customization system (called assemblies) from DOOM: The Roguelike into ZDoom. Development has continued steadily, and presently the mod not only implements all of DoomRL’s classes, monsters and assemblies, but adds several of its own, as well as two new difficulties called “Technophobia” and “Armageddon”, while simultaneously bumping the difficulty of the the game up across the board.